Pixel Droppings

Gold earring with glass head pendant, Phoenician/Carthaginian, 3rd-1st century BC

what if i say that the reason invisible disabilities consistently get more engagement with awareness and advocacy is because people don't have to confront their own thoughts about visible disability to interact and support them.

David was way politer than I would have been. But then he has a few years on me.

I'm adding a break here. Seriously, I have to take a breath every time I read the (absolutely breathtaking) insolence of this shit. (And it makes me want to take a brickbat to anybody who says "Warm regards" to me in the immediate future. [mutter])

...Doubtless I'll get past that. But JEEEEEZ. :/ (TL:DR for those interested: "Hi there! Your work is fabulous! You should have an award! Send us money to be part of the process.")

("The entry fee for the Discovery Awards is $150 USD for the primary book entry. If you would like the book considered in additional categories, each additional category entry is $100 USD.")

Beware this shit, my cousins. If they have the absolute baldfaced GALL (or utter ignorance, who knows which) to send David mails like these, they won't mind coming after the rest of us. :/

This is Rosemary Kennedy. She's about twenty years old in this photo. Three years before this picture was taken, she attended her first formal dance. Three years after it was taken, a neurologist who had never held a scalpel in his life sat beside her in an operating room and asked her to sing "God Bless America" while a surgeon pushed a blade into her brain.

She sang it.

Then she stopped singing. She stopped talking. She stopped being Rosemary.

She was twenty-three.

Her name was Rose Marie Kennedy. Third child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. Sister to a future president, a future senator, and the future founder of the Special Olympics. She had a mild intellectual disability. She could read and write at about a fourth-grade level, keep a diary, do multiplication, hold conversations, and travel across Europe. In May 1938 she curtsied before King George VI at Buckingham Palace. She tripped slightly. The family called it a triumph.

She wrote to her father in 1940: "Darling Daddy... I am so fond of you. And I love you so very much."

By her early twenties, Rosemary was having seizures and mood swings. Rages that scared the nuns at her convent school. She was sneaking out at night. Her father, Joe Kennedy, wasn't worried about her health. He was worried about headlines. He had sons to put in office. A daughter who might get pregnant or cause a scandal was a threat to the brand he was building.

So Joe found Walter Freeman.

Freeman was the most famous lobotomy advocate in America. Yale-trained neurologist. No surgical credentials. He'd read about a Portuguese doctor named Egas Moniz who was cutting nerve fibers in patients' brains, and Freeman had decided to bring the technique to America and turn it into a mass operation. He renamed it "lobotomy." By 1941, he and his partner Dr. James Watts had performed about two hundred of them.

In November 1941, Joe Kennedy brought Rosemary to George Washington University Hospital. He didn't tell his wife.

Here is what happened next, according to Watts's own account given to journalist Ronald Kessler and published in The Sins of the Father (1996).

Rosemary was awake. Mildly sedated but conscious. Watts cut through the top of her skull. Small incisions, about an inch on each side. He pushed an instrument into her frontal lobes. He described it later as looking like a butter knife. He swept it back and forth, severing white matter.

While Watts cut, Freeman talked to her. He asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer. She recited it. He asked her to sing. She sang. He asked her to count backward.

They decided how deep to cut based on how she responded.

When her words turned to mumbling, they kept going. When the mumbling collapsed into silence, they stopped. That was the endpoint. The moment her voice disappeared was the moment they decided they'd cut enough.

She came out of that room unable to speak. Unable to walk without help. Incontinent. Her left arm paralyzed. The cognitive capacity of a two-year-old. She was twenty-three years old and she would stay that way for sixty-three more years.

The family told people she'd gone to become a kindergarten teacher.

Her father built a private cottage on the grounds of a Catholic care facility in Jefferson, Wisconsin, called St. Coletta. Two nuns, Sister Margaret Ann and Sister Leona, became her world. They cared for her every single day for decades while the Kennedy dynasty played out on television screens across America.

Joe Kennedy never visited her. Not once. He died in 1969 without ever going to Wisconsin.

Rose Kennedy didn't see her daughter for twenty years.

The family kept the lobotomy secret for forty-six years. In 1962, Rosemary's sister Eunice published an article admitting Rosemary had an intellectual disability. She didn't mention the surgery. That didn't come out until 1987, when historian Doris Kearns Goodwin published The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.

But Eunice didn't just break the silence. She built something.

Camp Shriver, 1962. Her Maryland farm. Kids with intellectual disabilities swimming and running and competing because Eunice remembered what her sister was like before that operating room.

July 20, 1968. Soldier Field. Chicago. One thousand athletes. The first Special Olympics.

Today it serves six million athletes in over 200 countries.

JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act on October 31, 1963. It was the last law he ever signed. Twenty-two days later he was dead.

Walter Freeman performed about 3,500 lobotomies across 23 states. An estimated 490 of his patients died. He was banned from operating in 1967 after a woman died during her third lobotomy at his hands. Egas Moniz still has his Nobel Prize. Every petition to revoke it has been denied.

Rosemary Kennedy died on January 7, 2005. She was eighty-six. She spent sixty-three years in that cottage in Wisconsin because her father wanted a quiet daughter and a doctor promised him one.

Nobody asked her. The Sick History. Medicine. Monsters. Death. Full story with complete sourcing

I think it’s actually more because we live 600 miles away and traveling that far is hard for anyone let alone a profoundly disabled man who can’t speak

So we just come to him

We’ve been here for 3 weeks and penny has introduced Uncle Bug (that’s what she calls him) to chocolate Oreos and cakesters and he has introduced her to the Movie Robots and sour cream and onion chips and also opening heavy doors that we actually aren’t thrilled about lmao

“ONCE I CAN READ U GUYS WONT BE ABLE TO STOP ME AND UNCLE BUG!”

GUYS WONT BE ABLE TO STOP

ME AND UNCLE BUG!”

But what he is doing with corporations is also in line with fascism.

in the article Economic Fascism, Thomas J. DiLorenzo claims that fascists attempt to control business via "corporatism," where the government forces businesses to "partner" with them. Although businesses remain private, the government controls and coordinates what they do, with the "national interest" coming before profits. Labor unions are abolished. Taxpayers pay for business failures, and the government implements protectionist policies.

NOT THE CRABS WE EXPECTED BUT STILL SOME CRABS WE DESERVE!!!

I think part of the reason the rumor mill is working overtime here is because credible sources of news are so thin on the ground. Which is highlighting a bigger problem about US politics right now: it's difficult or even impossible trying to get your hands on any actual news. Because this administration doesn't put out statements or information; its only concern is PR.

And it's far worse PR to just let the ominous silence about the issue stretch on and on for weeks than it would be to actually show us whatever state he's currently in.

This is an administration that has no problem putting people in front of the camera when they are clearly in no shape to be doing anything other than convalescing. Trump is literally decomposing, and they're still perfectly happy to let him stagger around in front of the cameras.

An independent journalist published an audio of the paramedics responding to the situation. They were responding to a unconscious person in cardiac arrest and the audio indicates they performed CPR

This is what Red Cross says about CPR plus NPR article talking about CPR survival rate (trigger warning for disturbing details about patients deaths in the NPR article)

The odds of a person being restored to life after CPR is 7.6% as per NPR and cardiac arrest is 90% fatal according to Red Cross. Additionally McConnell was very old and frail. NPR says chances are much more dismal for older patients as CPR can be brutal on the body for an older patient

Chances are even lower if McConnell didn't start receiving CPR until paramedics arrived, every minute the brain is deprived of oxygen the situation worsens

People witnessing the ambulance taking McConnell away said the paramedics didn't seem to be acting very urgently which they thought was strange. The sirens were not on when the ambulance left. All of this from CNN article

Assuming the audio of the paramedics is real -- news media seems to treat it as reliable -- it would be highly unusual if McConnell wasn't either dead or incapacitated

That said, as a former journalist, scanner traffic is infamously unreliable. Journalists should NOT be using scanner audio as a source unless they have something else to back it up (for example, I used to report on local house fires; there have been multiple times where I’d go out to a reported fire and it turned out to be nothing/highly exaggerated).

The scanner audio itself seems real enough (and both big and small outlets should have the tools to double check this), but until there’s independent confirmation of the facts, I’m not treating a single word of it as true.